Despite claims that political correctness is merely about politeness and not offending folk, the Virtue-signalling that underlies political correctness corrupts public debate in various ways–it puts a criteria (status-as-Virtuous) above facts, it elevates intent over consequences and it sets up various taboos and ludicrous moral distinctions. Such as, for example, the claim that there is some great moral difference between “coloured people” and “people of colour”.

It also creates fundamentally silly public debates, such as over whether the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is, as it obsessively claims to be, Islamic.

Pernicious identity

Is ISIS mainstream Islam? Clearly not; it regards itself as being at war with mainstream Islam that has allowed itself to be corrupted by unbelief. Is it supported by most Muslims? Also, clearly not. But Islam, like Christianity, is a broad religion with a long history. Just because something is not mainstream, and is supported by only a minority of believers, does not mean it is not of that religion, or grounded in a particular variant or strain within it.

Note that this debate over what is “really” Islamic is not a debate which has anywhere near the same salience regarding Christianity or Judaism. It is a manifestation of an “essentialist” claim that would be derided if used elsewhere–the sort of folk who worry about what is “really” or “authentically” Muslim or Islamic would typically be very hostile to debates about what was “really” or “authentically” English, British, Australian, Western etc and likely to be highly contemptuous of attempts to exclude folk who do bad things from being Christian, Jewish, Western etc on the basis of some claim that they were not “authentically” such.

Islam is the easiest religion in the world to join: simply publicly make the profession of faith, the Shahada, (“there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is messenger of God”) and one has submitted and become a Muslim. There are various fringe groups that many Muslims do not regard as Muslim (the Alawites, for example) because of various doctrinal additions they adhere to, but that is a common feature of religions. (How many Christians do not regard Mormons as really Christian?)

Islam is a hard religion to leave–the traditional penalty for apostasy is death. That, in itself, just makes it a monotheistic religion, as Christianity and Judaism have historically embraced the “apostasy warrants death” view. The difference with contemporary Christianity and Judaism is that many Muslims still believe apostasy warrants death and various Islamic countries still make such apostasy a crime (up to, an including, the death penalty).

If adherents to ISIS profess their belief in Islam (as they clearly do) and are not apostates (as they clearly aren’t) then they are Muslim. Just as ISIS is clearly a manifestation of Islam as a civilisation. (Of Islamdom, so to speak.) Indeed, ISIS itself is part of a long history of violent, purifying movements that claim to go back to the “original” and “authentic” Islam (such as the Almoravids, Almohads, Safavids, etc).

Both Mehdi Hasan’s piece, and the response to Tom Holland, want to claim that if something is not mainstream, orthodox or supported by a majority of Muslims, then it is not Islamic. As any historian will tell you, that is a nonsense restriction. Something can be not mainstream, not orthodox, not supported by a majority, yet clearly be of that religion. If one simply wants to make clear about ISIS not being mainstream, orthodox, or supported by a majority of Muslims, then there is lots of evidence for that. It is making the extra claim that it is “not Islamic” which is the nonsense, which is going a step too far.

Why go there? Some reasons are alluded to in the blog post responding to Tom Holland–the desire not to taint all Muslims with the sins of some Muslims. First, note that this touching concern is not a general one–Western civilisation, for example, is clearly regarded as tainted by any bad thing any state or group therein has done. (Indeed, all white folk are apparently tainted by any bad thing any white person has done.) Second, this is almost childishly simple-minded: of course such a broad religion as Islam has many strains within it. This is attempting to ignore the reality of Islam in favour of some childish, cardboard-cut-out version of it. (And we are back to Virtue-signalling setting up a criteria above truth.)

Medhi Hasan’s piece essentially ignores the entire history of Islamism/political Islam/Muslim fundamentalism. Which also means ignoring decades of resistance and opposition within Islam (both as a religion and a civilisation) by Muslims and people of Muslim heritage to political Islam/Islamism/Muslim fundamentalism. Mention is made of most of ISIS’s victims being Muslim–which is most emphatically true of political Islam in general–but that decades-long specific history of opposition is glossed over or ignored.

Why? First, because it gets in the way of “blame the West”. It is strange how Muslim deaths due to Western actions are supposed to inspire support for ISIS, yet apparently Muslim deaths by ISIS only count as a sign of ISIS not being Islamic. Looking at the decades-long history of Islamism/political Islam/Muslim fundamentalism tells a much more complicated story than “blame the West”. However inconvenient that might be, for example, for Virtue-signalling.

Second, because something the critics within Islam of Islamism/political Islam/Muslim fundamentalism typically do not do, is try and deny that it is Islamic. They are all too aware of its religious nature, its religious claims, its attempt to hijack Islamic identity.

Indeed, it is Islamism/political Islam/Muslim fundamentalism’s claim that to be the “true”, “authentic” Islam which is so telling about its Islamic nature. The claim that it is not Islamic is mere propaganda, and pretty transparent mere propaganda at that.

Denying agency

One can also see the pernicious effects of Virtue-signalling at work in the juxtaposition of the notion that we should respect folk of different cultural backgrounds and then ignore the history of, in this case, an entire civilisation. Except as a victim-foil to Western history. It is preserving Muslims as sacred victims.

As an aside, Judaism, Christianity and Islam have a long history of teaching each other bigotry and techniques of bigotry. “No rights for queers, pagans and apostates” was something Christianity learnt from Judaism and both passed on to Islam. The techniques of dhimmitreatment was Islam extending, formalising, regularising and theologising the treatment of Jews in the Christian Eastern Roman Empire. From which systemisation, the Catholic Church, at the Fourth Lateran Council, adopted the idea of special clothing for Jews (to which it, of course, added Muslims where Sharia specified Christians). Anti-black racism was pioneered by North African Muslim writers to justify mass enslaving (rather than converting, so making them ineligible to be slaves) of sub-Saharan Africans and continues to exist within the Arab world. But to grasp the back-and-forth history, one has to see Islam as a civilisation in its own right; not reduce Muslims to dependant causal puppets, merely reacting to Western actions.

One can see a socio-political point in trying to excise Islamism/political Islam/Muslim fundamentalism from Islam, but such strategy is not truth. Nor is it remotely plausible outside those who are keen on Virtue-signalling. (Including, of course, the view that Islam is inherently virtuous.) This is just another version of the No True Scotsman fallacy.

In the West, people of Muslim heritage who are critics of Islamism/political Islam/Muslim fundamentalism typically find they are subject to various ways of “managing” them; typically to preserve a positive image of Islam. The notion that there is a single Islamic identity (and it requires protection) actually ends up doing much of the work of Islamism/political Islam/Muslim fundamentalism for it, since they are so insistent that there is only one “authentic” Islam, which they represent.

The response to that is not to make the (false) claim that adherents of Islamism/political Islam/Muslim fundamentalism are not Islamic, but to contest the claim that Islam is just one identity. To pretend that Islam is entirely unproblematic, that there are no problematic or awkward ideas within it, is not the clever, adult thing to do; it is childish. It puts Virtue-signalling over truth. (It also feeds into Islamist/political Islam/Muslim fundamentalist claims about true Islam as social harmony, a cure to social alienation.) Muslims are not children and we should not implicitly, or explicitly, treat them as such.

Jeffrey Herf (Professor of History, University of Maryland) recently suggested that President Obama apply the same standards to Christianity and Islam. This is a delightfully naive suggestion.

First, there seems to be a belief among various Western leaders that criticising any strain within Islam is somehow a criticism of all Muslims. This is, of course, pathetically condescending, but is an understandable result of the application of identity politics to Muslims as an undifferentiated group.

Second, the Obama Administration–whose utterances make sense if treated as the faculty lounge mutterings of a mediocre university Sociology department–is clearly pervaded by the use of such identity politics as a device for signalling virtue.

Third, considering strains within Islam as problematic leads naturally, and awkwardly, to critical analysis of the ideology of the Iranian regime. And that would not be helpful, to say the least, to the Administration’s (apparently increasingly desperate) desire to achieve some sort of over-arching deal with Iran. (That is, the Iranian regime which most Iranians have come to loathe.)

Invisible Islamism

In the PC universe, as instanced by the rhetoric of the Obama Administration, there is no such thing as bad Muslims, because if you are really bad then you are not really Muslim–hence the Islamic State is “not Islamic“, it is a perversion of a great (un-named) religion. Conversely, Jews are not victims because they are Jews, they are unlucky victims of “random” attack. Yet, three Muslims are killed, and the President is all about folk not being targeted for their religion. This refusal to talk in terms of Islamic origins and Islamic motives is clearly considered and continuing policy.

This is part of a much wider pattern, where Western liberals, progressives and folk of the left (with a few honourable exceptions) refuse to talk seriously about (often even notice) Islamism/political Islam/Muslim fundamentalism, much to the deep and abiding frustration of their confreres in the Islamic world. When individual Muslims do bad things, their Muslim identity is often downplayed or ignored.

Critics of political correctness delight in pointing out such absurdities and contradictions, but they do not understand: those contradictions and absurdities are not a bug, they are a feature.

Signalling virtue

First, the point of political correctness is to signal virtue (or, rather, Virtue with a very capital ‘V’). Precisely because the point is to signal Virtue, by adapting Xavier Marquez‘s theory of cults of personality as loyalty signalling, we can see how the willingness to embrace absurdities and contradictions just demonstrates how committed to being Virtuous you are.

Marquez’s theory of cults of personality is quite straightforward. How do you signal loyalty in a situation where loyalty is compulsory? You go completely over the top. You show yourself willing to engage in positively nauseating public displays of flattery and adulation.

So, how do you signal Virtue in a situation where moralised discourse is compulsory? You get really, really finicky about the use of language and commitment to various moral mascots (to use Thomas Sowell’s expression) or sacred victims (to use Jonathan Haidt’s analysis).

Thus, just as cults of personality have flattery inflation, political correctness has Virtue inflation. Leading to what has been rather nicely (if amusingly nastily) described as look-at-me-I’m-the-most-special-snowflake factionalism. As Patricia Arquette discovered, when she made a short, passionate speech at the Oscars for equal pay for women. And immediately the “I’m the more special snowflake” Virtue inflation erupted. The heterosexual white woman had failed to check her privilege and to get the moral ordering correct. Outraged denunciations thundered forth (all via).

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Why not just say “queer”? Indeed, the more confronting the exoticism of a group (especially to previous moral and cultural usages), the better they function as differentiating markers of Virtue.

Which is where swallowing absurdity and self-contradiction comes in. Just as the adherent of a cult of personality goes over the top to signal loyalty to the ruler, so an adherent of the cult of Ostentatious Virtue accepts contradiction and absurdity to show their commitment to Virtue.

Which makes contemporary Islam (infected with Islamism) perfect as a marker of Virtue. To be truly Virtuous, one must understand when misogyny, queer-hatred, Jew-hatred and being anti-democratic count, and when they do not. One must understand when to See No Evil and when to see Only Evil. So, precisely because Islamism is so misogynist, so full of queer-hatred, Jew-hatred, hostility to democracy, so willing to engage in massacre, it makes “See No Evil” treatment of Muslims such a splendid marker of Virtue. Treating Islamism–with its misogyny, queer-hatred, Jew-hatred, hostility to democracy, recurring slaughter–as ideally as a non-Muslim event (or otherwise a non-morally-significant-event) becomes part of signalling Virtue.

As Jonathan Haidt notes, sacredness involves abandoning trade-offs. The sacred victims are not placed with other mere mortals within a web of trade-offs between moral principles, but elevated to a special moral purity. So, Islam (or at least Muslim identity) purifies and ennobles in a way that Christian belief and identity most emphatically do not. As we can see in President Obama’s selective silences.

Those irritating Jews

Jew-hatred, for example, becomes something of a non-issue for the Virtuous (unless specifically pressed on the subject), as it is nowadays overwhelmingly concentrated in the Muslim world, including Muslim communities in the West. Under the See No Muslim Evil approach, it becomes impossible to see that Israel is primarily not hated because of its treatment of the Palestinians; overwhelmingly it is hated because it is successful Jews–something Israel cannot do anything about, except to disappear. But to critically examine Muslim Jew-hatred would wildly get in the way of using Muslims as moral mascots and sacred victims, so such Jew-hatred (to the extent that it gets noticed at all) gets blamed on the Jews, using the fig-leaf of “anti-Zionism”. Thus, nothing bad is to be inferred about the security guards outside Jewish schools and synagogues–except about Jews (via the Jewish state).

Who thereby become the only hate-target group to be blamed for being hated, via the fig-leaf of “anti-Zionism”. (Which much of the European elite are happy to buy into, as they have never forgiven the Jews for the Holocaust, of which the Jewish state is a permanent reminder–the Holocaust does so get in the way of the European elite’s pretensions to be the moral elite and arbiters for the globe and Jews are such a small, and declining, percentage of Europe’s population.) To blame anyone but the Jew(ish state), would be to fatally undermine the See No Muslim Evil marker of Virtue.

You do not live like human beings. You do not (even) live like animals. You accept homosexuality. And now you criticize us?

Is to be not playing the Ostentatious Virtue game.

Refusing to acknowledge that Islam is both a religion and a civilisation, Muslims are Virtuously defined by their religion (or some useful conception thereof), so that to criticise Islam is somehow to denigrate all Muslims. A principle not applied to, for example, Christians.

Lumping all Muslims together in a common identity does a great deal of the Islamists’ work for them, as the Islamists are so very much about Islam as a single, completely trumping, identity. But, as Ostentatious Virtue puts such huge moral weight on belief, that provides another convergence between Islamism and Ostentatious Virtue. As does a sufficiently anodyne notion of “anti-imperialism”–provided one is prepared to completely toss over any notion of anti-fascism–and a shared propensity to collective moral narcissism.

Totalitarian Othering

To take the menace of Islamism seriously would fatally undermines the See No Muslim Evil marker of Virtue. So, Islamism’s ideology is ignored (or misrepresented). A useful instancing summary of said ideology is here:

In the Holy Quran, Allah (SWT) has promised the Muslim nation the authority to rule over the world based on only one condition. That condition is to follow His orders in absolute manner and not to associate any partners with Him. Because Allah (SWT) has said “Verily, Allah forgives not the partners should be set up with Him (in worship), but He forgives except that (anything else) to whom He pleases, and whoever sets up partners with Allah (in worship), he has indeed invented a tremendous sin.” …

Once the Jews and Christians have realized that it is no longer possible for them to make the Muslims worship idols, they have invented idols in the name of various ideologies (such as Democracy, Regional Nationalism etc.) to derail the Muslims from their Fundamental Belief. They have forced others to accept their ideologies through deceptive tricks, and even by applying military force where necessary. Apart from that they, have masked their Idols in the names of “Society”, “State Governance” etc, in such a manner that unless a Muslim is highly conscious, it is not possible for him to unveil these masks. In vain he unknowingly gets trapped in the web of conspiracies of Jews and Christians. …

A practical example is the most prevailing social order of this present world -DEMOCRACY- The fundamental guiding principle of Democracy (Stimulated by Former U.S.A. President Abraham Lincoln) is “Democracy for the people of the people by the people”. Thus, to accept Democracy is to believe that people are sovereign and the source of ALL power. Let us take a look at some statements given by majority of political scientists. From among them Austin has said “LAW IS THE WILL OF SOVEREIGN” and Jan Boda has said “IT IS THE DUTY OF THE SOVEREIGN TO MAKE LAW”. So we can understand from their statements that if the people are sovereign and the source of all power then the authority is in their hand to make law in a Democratic system. Whereas on the other hand, Allah (SWT) (the Creator of people and the Great Lord of the Cosmopolitan) has declared that “And to Allah belongs the sovereignty of the heaven and the earth, and to Allah is the return (of all).” …

But not many people realize the clear meaning of the above Verses that, Democracy and Islam directly contradict each other. Nevertheless few people are aware of the fact that they will lose their Imaan upon accepting the ideologies (such as Democracy) of the Jews and Christians.

It is sad to say, instead of awaring Muslims of this fact, a group of people from among the Muslims, some hypocrites in the disguise of preachers of Islam, are making every effort to make the Muslims believe that “Democracy” is in congruence with Islam and it is the best system in the present situation of the world. With their misguided speech and explanations, these hypocrites are ruining and diminishing the main pillar of Imaan and Aqeedah of Muslims (Tawheed). Due to this, people who claim to be Muslims cannot understand that these ideologies are rather double-faced and controversial the Islam and with one’s Imaan. They fail to understand that it is an outright act of shirk to involve oneself in the work of constitutions based on such ideologies!

To describe such for what it is–a totalitarian project of social and global domination–is to violently contradict the game of See No Muslim Evil as marker of Virtue. To notice the pervasive and vicious Othering involved is even more so.

Hence the antipathy to apostates such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali–by insisting on applying general moral principles to the lives of (in particular) women in Muslim communities, she utterly gets in the way of treating Muslims as a group as moral mascots and sacred victims. Thereby ignoring real victims; the oppression and misery hidden away in God-locked communities, themselves full of intense Othering.

Which means that the See No Muslim Evil as marker of Virtue becomes an exercise in systematic denial of realty, of the facts of the matter. Said denial being not just a river in Egypt, but a basic underpinning of the Obama Administration’s Middle Eastern policy.

This is not at all likely to end well.

But it manifests elsewhere. Thus Ayaan Hirsi Ali found that the Dutch government–which collected all sorts of statistics on violence–did not statistically identify (dis)honour killings because, in the words of civil servants in the Ministry of Justice:

We don’t register murders based on a category of motivation. It would stigmatise one group in society. (p.296).

Just contemplate the moral calculus involved in that decision for a moment.

But the same concern over status as Virtuous versus actual lived lives and real (rather than “sacred”) victims manifested in the Rotherham scandal, where racism (correctly understood as concern for one’s status as Virtuous) seriously got in the way of doing anything about real victims.

It really is about a Virtual morality substituting for an elementary decency one.

Women killed by Muslim fundamentalists in Algeria in the 1990s.

Oh, and just to be clear. Yes, I am saying that the self-righteous adherents of the cult of Ostentatious Virtue in the West care more about their own sense of warm inner glow, moral vanity and collective sense of Virtue than the brutal realities of massacre and oppression that Islamists has been engaged in for decades now, because they give those deaths and oppressions so little practical significance.

Worse, they passively or actively collaborate in the Islamist hijacking of Muslim identity (such as completely failing to put the Charlie Hebdo attack in the context of a decades-long campaign of murder and assassination against Muslim, and Muslim heritage, writers and journalists), burbling on about–utterly undifferentiated–”Muslim” sensibilities: a pattern that goes back to responses to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Given the manifold victims of Islamism, we can see that Muslim lives do not count if they get in the way of the game of Ostentatious Virtue; a game of never-mind-the-lived-reality-of-others, feel one’s Virtue.

In the ever-widening world of PC word taboos, there is “punching down“, as in one should not “punch down” (i.e. verbally attack or make fun of folk who are less privileged or empowered than oneself). It sees to have originally started in the field of comedy, so the origins of the term probably has some connection to punch line (though possibly not). But if it did, it has rapidly lost any such connection.

Clearly, the notion of “punching down” is deeply connected to the idea that entertainment, culture and literary effort should be moralised in a very particular way. In particular, with a very particular set of rankings. If one meant the point literally, then no comedian earning $X amount annually should ever make fun of any earning $<X annually. The more money you make, the fewer people you could make fun of.

Obviously, that is not what is meant.

If not, why not?

Because we are dealing with entire categories of people who can allegedly be ranked in terms of privilege. This is problematic in so any ways that it is hard to know where to begin. For example, social advantage can play quite differently in otherwise similar societies: the common (and tedious) American assumption that their particular set of social advantages/disadvantages are shared by everyone does not actually work for the rest of the Anglosphere, let alone anyone else. (This is nicely discussed here.)

The second, much bigger problem, is that the proposed categories are way too crude to bear the moral weight being loaded onto them. SF author Larry Corriea zeroes in on this little difficulty:

I only say that because I grew up with all that fancy Portuguese Dairy Farmer Privilege, where I got to have an alcoholic mother and a functionally illiterate father (who is way darker skinned than Tempest), where I got to spend my formative years knee deep in cow shit at 3:00 AM, so that I could later work my way through Utah State (only after getting a scholarship for my freshmen year because I knew a whole lot about cows), to then spend my adult life working corporate drone jobs of increasing difficulty and skill requirements, all while writing on the side while I supported my family, until I could make it as a professional author.

The entire punching up/down concept appears to be nothing more than an attempt at a caste system.

Has a certain amount of truth to it. As is so often the case within the PC-universe, we are dealing with a word-obsessed vulgar (very vulgar) Marxism of very broad categories which are nevertheless highly moralised. Comedy is a particularly poor vehicle for such crude categorising, as it so depends on context.

Part of what is going on here is a public discussion about good taste. But, as that is an “elitist” conception, it has to be passed off as “concern for the oppressed/underprivileged/disadvantaged” for people who cannot seem to make a substantive moral judgement if it is not on the oppressor-oppressed axis (from the three-axes model of political discourse). This post seems to be groping towards “folks, it’s just bad form”. By comparison, this post really cannot get out of the oppressed/oppression rut, to the extent that not getting labels right is “oppression”.

One has to live in a very open and tolerant society if issues of labels are matters of “oppression”. In fact, it is a rather indecent moral inflation, given the amount of serious oppression that exists in the world today. (Overwhelmingly, of course, outside the West.)

One takes it that satirising Christianity would not be “punching down”, but satirising Islam apparently is, or is likely to be, or something. (Even though Christians are far more likely to be subject to religious persecution in the world today, just not in the West.) This is some of the crudest categorising of all, given the great diversity of perspective among actual Muslims/people of Muslim heritage (Islam being both a religion and a civilisation). As this post alludes to, bundling Muslims/people of Muslim heritage together gives aid and comfort to genuinely oppressive religious forces (who are, as I have said elsewhere, the Nazism of our times).

Murderously oppressive, as instanced in the recent murder of Bangladeshi-American atheist blogger and writer Dr. Avijit Roy; the murder a few months ago of a Bangladeshi sociology professor, Professor Shafiul Islam, who opposed full-face veils; previous murders of (warning–violent images), and assassination attempts on, atheist bloggers and writers: all murders in a single Muslim country by people who think words terribly important–because they want to control public space, to control what can be said–and are very willing to murder to do so.

Torchlight procession in honour of slain writer and in protest at his murder.

There is another indecent moral inflation which struck me when I came across the term “punching down”. That is conflating words with violence. If one makes words terribly, terribly important–particularly if one starts using terms which allude to violence (“punching down”, “micro-aggression”)–then that has the effect of minimising the difference between words and actual violence. The effect is to lower the moral weight of actual violence–moral weight not being an indefinitely expandable resource, given human cognitive limits and time constraints.

It is the difference between saying “you just don’t kill people over words and cartoons” and “but we have to consider the particular words and cartoons”. No, actually we don’t. And that the more PC you are, the less you get that is a sign of how political correctness’s serious over-weighting of the importance of words actually degrades, rather than elevates, moral understanding.

A recurring theme of Algerian-American law academic’s Karima Bennoune‘s moving and informative Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism is the disastrous consequences of pandering to Muslim fundamentalism. For example, Karima Bennoune’s Pakistani interlocutors note how important the “Islamisation” program of Zia ul-Haq‘s regime was in encouraging fundamentalism (p.241). The British in Egypt played the Muslim Brotherhood against the secular nationalists, Israel played Hamas against Fatah, Sadat and Mubarak played the Muslim Brotherhood against the liberals, the Algerian regime played the FIS against democratic secularists, Pakistan partly created the Taliban as an instrument to dominate Afghanistan and has used jihadis against India, the US funded fundamentalists against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The list goes on.

While political or strategic expedience was part of what was going on, one also wonders if the baleful effect of the Hegelian fallacy of modernisation theory was not also in play–the presumption that history has a direction, so serious religious belief is a thing of the past; thus “wave of the future” liberals, democrats, nationalists, secularists are the more “serious” threat. It surely plays a role in so many Western intellectuals, journalists and politicians being unable to take religious motives seriously.

One is reminded of the original “Red-Brown” alliance–the StalinistKPD functionally helping the Nazis to bring down the Weimar Republic on the grounds that as “mere reactionaries” the Nazis were doomed by History. That turned out very badly for the KPD and while, in the longer run, the Soviet Union was able to expand, it only survived the consequences of the Nazi-Soviet Pact through the Anglo-Americans diverting key German forces (such as much of the Luftwaffe) and massively subsidising the Soviet war effort.

The nature of the project

Another theme in the book is that the operational choices of Islamists vary far more than their underlying aims. Which puts into context the dramatic tactical shifts the Tunisian Islamist Party Ennahda has engaged in, for example (Pp272-3). In his 1993 piece Compromise with Political Islam is Impossible, Algerian left-wing educator Salah Chouaki, gunned down by Muslim fundamentalists in 1994, wrote:

[Egyptian philosopher Fouad] Zakariya identified and analyzed the following pattern: the Islamists occupy the socio-cultural terrain, then the politico-ideological terrain. They exert a multiform pressure on the society and the state. The latter makes concessions to them, and even ends up trying to outdo them so as not to allow itself to appear less Islamist than the Islamists. Thus, the state introduces Islamism in school, in the cultural realm, in institutions, in different spheres – including the economic one – thinking or pretending to think that it is promoting Islam as a religion. The Islamists profit from all of this, re-investing their gains in all manner of renewed pressures which win them yet more ground, and then they repeat this pattern again, at ever higher levels.

It is very much about a “long march through the institutions“; positively Gramscian indeed. All of which reinforces my point that the jihadis are the Islamic equivalent of the Nazis–a modernising revolt against modernity, adopting the operational techniques and total politics of Leninism for a very different political project; emphasising heroic, warrior virtues (whose appeal Susan Sontag memorably analysed in her Fascinating Fascism essay) in an explicitly atavistic project. Though theirs is a project of master believers rather than a master race. Still, Susan Sontag’s closing comments are remarkably apposite:

Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.

The jihadis are the SS without the tailoring:

the SS seems to be the most perfect incarnation of fascism in its overt assertion of the righteousness of violence, the right to have total power over others and to treat them as absolutely inferior. It was in the SS that this assertion seemed most complete, because they acted it out in a singularly brutal and efficient manner; and because they dramatized it by linking themselves to certain aesthetic standards.

Where loading up beheadings and brutality on YouTube replaces uniform aesthetics as the way to make one’s statement about valorising violence. For:

fascism—also stands for an ideal, and one that is also persistent today, under other banners…the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect; the family of man [believers] (under the parenthood of leaders).

The cult of the homicidal self-immolation of slaughtering “martyrs” is most certainly a fetishism of courage. When German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen infamously said of the destruction of the Twin Towers that it was:

the greatest work of art ever. That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of, that people practice madly for ten years, completely, fanatically, for a concert and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos. I could not do that. Against that, we, composers, are nothing.

visually stunning artwork: The thing about 9/11, is that it’s kind of like an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually. . . . Of course, it’s visually stunning and you’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would ever have thought possible. . . . So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing.

They were vindicating the continuing relevance of Sontag’s analysis.

The ambitions of the Muslim fundamentalists are, however, much more grandiose than those of the Nazis. The Nazis “merely” wanted a Lebensraum empire to the Urals which would be (amongst other “purifications“) Judenfrei. The Muslim fundamentalists are thinking much more global. In the words of the Islamic State’s spokesperson:

“We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” Adnani, the spokesman, promised in one of his periodic valentines to the West. “If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.”

What is the “root cause” of a multi-generational ambition for global domination? Or is salvation-through-seeking-global-acceptance-of-submission-to-the-sovereignty-of-Allah its own reward? Both in this world and the next.

Dilemmas of opposition

Secularists in the Islamic world are often in very difficult positions. Fewer more so than Palestinian secularists, caught between Hamas and Israel (p.325). And the corruption of Fatah.

As an aside, Karima Bennoune manages a lovely demolition of Jerry Falwell:

On the tenth anniversary [of 9/11], I thought a lot about the victims, like Father Mychal Judge, a gay Franciscan priest who was a Fire Department chaplain and died in the lobby of Tower One. Father Mike had administered to AIDS patients and alcoholics and was a fan of Celtic rock band Black 47. Rushing to comfort victims of terror, he became one. Christian fundamentalist Jerry Falwell said of 9/11 a few days later that the feminists and gays and all who tried to secularise America “helped this happen”. Though he subsequently apologised, Falwell was clearly unable to understand Father Mike’s life or his death (p.265).

Though, in a through-the-looking-glass way, Falwell was right, in that it is a wish to have, and a determination to block, the sorts of social freedoms that Westerners take for granted as experience and aspiration which has so riven the Muslim world. Karima Bennoune is right to wonder why Western liberals, progressives and folk of the left–who are so quick to denounce the politics of Western religious fundamentalism–seem so blind and mute about its (much worse) Muslim equivalents. Leftists of Muslim heritage, such as Fouad Zakaria and Salah Chouaki, can grapple critically with Islamic history:

In each and every case, it is fundamentalism that succeeds in re-orienting the positions that take hold in these spheres in its favor. This is because of the enormous scientific and cultural lag that affects these countries. It is also because the balance of power within religion, as shaped by our history, has erased the brightest pages of our Arabo-Islamic cultural patrimony – those which carry the seeds of rationality and of modernity. This historical dynamic has promoted the domination of the most conservative and obscurantist interpretations.

They are simply (mostly) ignored. Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka said on International Day of Peace in 2012 about Boko Haram:

We have an organisation which closes down schools, shoots faculty teachers…and turns most of the north into an educational wasteland. How can we reach children there? We must first get rid of Boko Haram. (p.266)

Karima Bennoune continues:

Movements like Boko Haram and Al Qaeda are so bent on the destruction of human beings that the only possible response is to abhor them–not the individuals in them but their collective political organisation and what it does. (p.266)

Boko Haram being another viciously murderous organisation operating in a social context free of substantive connections to the Cold War, Western intervention or the Israel-Palestine conflict. None of which ever explains why Muslim fundamentalists mainly kill fellow Muslims, use such recurring techniques of massacre, murder and brutality or engage in recurring forms of social and religious repression. The “root cause” of jihadi terror is Muslim fundamentalism: looking for congenial-to-framings social causes is like looking for the “root cause” of the Holocaust in the unemployment of the early 1930s.

Was Abu Bakr [first Caliph] morally wrong to burn that man [Fuja'ah Al-Sulami] alive? Nobody dares to say so. So we are left in this vicious circle, and you can expect more barbarity, because all this barbarity is sacred. It is sacred. This barbarity is wrapped in religion. It is immersed in religion. It is all based on religion. Your mission [as a cleric] is to say that while it is part of our religion, the interpretation is wrong. Do not tell people that Islam has nothing to do with this.

The suggestions of those interviewed by Karima Bennoune (300 people in 30 countries) about what to do about Muslim fundamentalism are many and varied (p.332). What Karima Bennoune herself seeks is popular mobilisation against Muslim fundamentalism and an empowering of civil society (Pp 332-3). Both their violence and their ideology need to be opposed:

there can be no successful strategy to combat terrorism that does not involve a commitment to ending the relentless fundamentalist attacks on civilians in Muslim majority contexts…

…the problem is also the discriminatory and hateful ideology that underlies it, the yeast that makes its beer. (p.336).

There are no useful “moderate” Islamist allies or partners for peace. There is:

a need to sometimes be uncompromising in facing off with fundamentalism. The attempts by some governments, by some academics, by some in civil society, and even by some Western feminists to accommodate some Muslim fundamentalist views about things like equality and the role of religion in public life help advance Islamist goals and undermine the people whose efforts are chronicled in this book (p.341).

There is an unresolvable contradiction between support for the idea of a modern society and the belief…that it is possible to ‘domesticate’ the totalitarian monster of fundamentalism. …

The best way to defend Islam is to put it out of the reach of all political manipulation. The best way to defend the modern state is to put it out of the reach of all exploitation of religion for political ends. (p.341)

As Karima Bennoune writes:

The world is messy and defies simple paradigms. That is what the fundamentalists cannot tolerate, but their opponents must. (p.312)

But they are master belief totalitarians; which it is why it is necessary for decent folk to see them for what they are and revile their entire awful project. Reading Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here is an excellent step in intellectual hygiene and celebrating a certain basic moral decency.

[This is an adapted extract from my two-part review of Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here, published here and here.]

As more than one commentator has pointed out, much of the contemporary intellectual and political Western elite does not understand, or give much weight to, religious motives. Using religion to justify actions they have a more of a grip on, than doing things for religious motives.

The controversy over President Obama’s prayer breakfast comments show this quite well. In the most controversial passage, he slides from motivation to justification:

Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

For the Crusades and the Inquisition, religious motives were definitely crucial. US slavery and Jim Crow were justified within explicitly Christian frameworks, but were hardly motivated by Christianity. By comparison, attempts to reintroduce slavery in Sudan and the Islamic State seem to be substantially motivated by religious claims.

In overwhelmingly Christian societies, in times when Christianity remained the dominating moral framework, almost anything was justified within explicitly Christian frameworks–thus, both slavery and the opposition to it; both Jim Crow and the opposition to it. Use of religious justifications tell us almost nothing, except that religious framings have resonance in that society: or, at least, among the target audience. Indeed, given that opposition to slavery and Jim Crow had a larger dose of altruism than support thereof, the opposition likely had a stronger dose of religious motivation.

Which is why, for example, Ta-nehisi Coates defence of President Obama’s comments, and his pushback against the President’s critics, falls flat. Coates writes about justification rather than motivation. Indeed, he implicitly denies that the Islamic State is about religious motives:

Now, Christianity did not “cause” slavery, anymore than Christianity “caused” the civil-rights movement. The interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power. That is what the Muslims terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian terrorists did for the lion’s share of American history.

Yes, ISIS uses religious justifications, but to imply that all they are about is religious justifications is nonsense on stilts. I have called volunteering to fight for ISIS psychopathic sex tourism, but I did not mean to imply by that religious motivation is not important. It is not merely that Medinan Islam is the framing for their actions, it is quite clear that religion is a very powerful motivator for their actions. A particular conception of Islam, to be sure, but one well within the historical parameters of that faith. Islam is not always like this; not even close. But it is recurrently like this.

Even regarding the Crusades, the Christianity-Islam analogy is dubious. There were four great areas of crusading activity: the Prussian and Livonian marches, Iberia, the Levant and North Africa. The Crusades on the Prussian and Livonian marches were straight aggression against pagans, both motivated and justified by religion (with some anti-Orthodox aggression added in). The Crusades in Spain were part of the Reconquista–the reconquest of Iberia after the Muslim conquest. The Crusades in the Levant (Outremer) were a (belated) response to the Muslim advance through Anatolia after the Eastern Roman disaster of the Battle of Manzikert. Like the North African crusades, they were attacks on formerly Christian lands. Indeed, none of the anti-Muslim crusades were other than attacks on formerly Christian lands, conquered by Muslim religious aggression. All part of how very lost in the modern secular mind The Lost History of Christianity is (which philosopher Michael Walzer provides an excellent example of).

The reverse is not remotely true. Historically, religiously motivated Christian attacks on Islam are dwarfed by religiously motivated Islamic attacks on Christendom. Which remains very much true. Apart from anything else, in the contemporary world, Christian persecution of Muslims is dwarfed by Muslim persecution of Christians.

Moreover, most contemporary Christians do not live in Europe and North America. How much are the Crusades and the Inquisition part of “their” history for African and Asian Christians? It is one thing to point out that Christians-as-people and Muslims-as-people are, as people, equivalent in their capacity for violence and brutality. It is quite another to pretend that Islam has not been the more violently aggressive religion, nor that it is not so in the contemporary world.

Much of the pushback against President Obama’s remarks are precisely due to folk comparing contemporary Christianity with contemporary Islam and thinking that the President’s remarks miss the point. Even in their selective sense of history, the remarks rather do. But, in their gliding over the difference between justification and motivation, they do so even more.

That this relatively mild, and correct, point cannot be made without the comments being dubbed, “the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” by a former Virginia governor gives you some sense of the limited tolerance for any honest conversation around racism in our politics. And it gives you something much more. My colleague Jim Fallows recently wrote about the need to, at once, infantilize and deify our military. Perhaps related to that is the need to infantilize and deify our history. Pointing out that Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something similar to what ISIS is doing now does not make ISIS any less barbaric, or any more correct.

But if you see what ISIS does as merely justified by religion, rather than also motivated by it, you miss much of the point. And one can see how contemporary Christians could be offended by the President’s remarks without any spectre of racism: Ta-nehisi Coates seems much more comfortable importing bad-faith-about-racism motives to fellow Americans than religious motives to foreign Muslims; in large part because, one suspects, because he is not comfortable with the notion of religious motives: still less where taking them seriously might lead us.

He much prefers to put religion back in a box:

Obama seemed to be going for something more—faith leavened by “some doubt.” If you are truly appalled by the brutality of ISIS, then a wise and essential step is understanding the lure of brutality, and recalling how easily your own society can be, and how often it has been, pulled over the brink.

You see, it’s all about us, really. As if the contemporary West–or, for that matter, contemporary Christianity–has not learned anything. Thereby missing the point hugely. Yes, of course, humans are capable of much brutality (there is plenty of brutality in Western history, including modern Western history). But they are also capable of getting better, of learning, of increasingly listening to, and acting on, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Which is why the joyous, uploaded-to-Youtube, brutality of ISIS or Boko Haram is so confronting: it is so very atavistic. They really do want to take us to a world where C7th Arabia is the epitome of moral and social understanding, and to do so for religious reasons and religious motives. They appeal to folk precisely because they provide religious justification and motives for, most flagrantly, enthusiastic brutality. But also that promise of an end to alienation, to grand unifying purpose, that intense political–and especially religious–movements provide. One cannot analyse them solely in religious terms, but if you do not understand the seriousness of their religious motivations, you do not understand them.

And, no, it is not all about us. People are not being massacred, enslaved and oppressed for us to draw banal moral lessons. That is just looking at us so we do not have to look at the uncomfortable them. Where near sins and past sins are so much more comfortable lessons for virtue than present brutalities.

Attempts to compare Christianity and Islam often involve citing Scriptures or specific doctrines. The problem with doing so is that, within any faith, people often ignore inconvenient Scriptures or doctrines, vary dramatically in how they read them, in what Scriptures and doctrines they focus on, etc. The logic of belief is not necessarily the logic of believers: as witnessed by the Theological Incorrectness phenomenon.

I tend to be more impressed by historical patterns, as they indicate what social logics are operating within a religion and what persistence (if any) they have.

Contemporary Islam and Christianity both have very significant movements within them which seek to return to the origins of the religion. A comparison of such is quite revealing.

I am not talking here of religious fundamentalism, which is a modern, even modernist, movement. Modernism seeks to eliminate the detritus of the past on the basis that new is (always) better. While fundamentalism may be about “seeking the fundamentals”, in practice it is very modernist.

I mean attempts to go back to the origins of the faith in life and spirit. In their rejection of tradition, such movements can overlap with fundamentalism, but they are not identical.

Of course, in one sense it is impossible to return to the origins of any religion; the river of history has moved on, changing context and understanding. Thus, once the European Enlightenment happened, Westerners could never really be actively pre-Enlightenment, only Counter-Enlightenment. Nevertheless, the desire to return to origins of faith can be a powerful one.

Returning to origins

The dominant such return-to-origins movement within Christianity is Pentecostalism. It is phenomenally successful–from a few hundred adherents around 1900, it had about 250 million by 2000: at that rate of growth (a large assumption), there will be a billion Pentecostals by the middle of this century.

If you seek to go back to original Christianity, what do you do? A lot of preaching, a lot of attention to the Gospels’ you seek to have the experience of the Holy Spirit indwelling (hence Pentecostal, from the original Pentecost), speak in tongues, and engage in congregational togetherness. There is a strong aspect of collective self-help in Pentecostalism, as there was in early Christianity. Hence much of its appeal to the wretched of the Earth, both the materially wretched and the spiritually wretched.

Islamic history is full of violent, purifying movements who seek to follow the example of the Prophet and go forth and conquer. They have the Medinan Surasand the life of the Prophet (“the walking Quran“) as conqueror and ruler to inspire them.

The Meccan-Medinan cycle

Islam also has extended periods of intellectual and artistic ferment and tolerance. The Islam of the Meccan Suras. The Islam of pragmatic tolerance, of live and let live (as long as Muslim dominance is not threatened). The Islam of the Umayyad (661-750) and early Abbasid Caliphates (750-C11th), of early al-Andalus, of the Central Asian Enlightenment, of the great Mughals.

The problem is, Meccan Islam is always followed by Medinan Islam. Cosmopolitan al-Andalus was overwhelmed by the Almoravids and Almohades. The Seljuq Turk advance imposed a much more rigid and intolerant version of Islam. An anti-tolerance counter-reaction which became even more intense in response to the Mongol onslaught, finishing off the Central Asian Enlightenment. Islam under stress typically reacts by being much more Medinan.

Nor is stress necessary for the switch to occur. Even the periods of tolerance were punctuated by episodes of massacre and repression: either because some ruler shifted to the Medinan approach or due to clerical incitement. Or such “Meccan” periods are simply ended by such shifts. The period of Mughal tolerance came to an end when Aurangzeb (r.1658-1707) took the throne, though it had been declining somewhat under his father, Shah Jahan (r.1628-1658). The death of Meccan Islam is always an in-house killing: it is murdered by Muslims, not outsiders.

Needless to say, the jihadis are Medinan Islam.

It is not good enough to point to Meccan Islam and say “that is Islam”. Medinan Islam is also Islam: and Islam regularly returns to it. The contrast between Pentecostalism and the jihadis does tell us something about the difference between Christianity (particularly Christianity in the contemporary world) and Islam.

It is a revolutionary Power in the straightforward sense that it is the only contemporary state seriously trying to export its revolution, apart from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It is also a revolutionary Power in a somewhat more subtle sense, in that it produces so much of the technology that continues to transform the world. Which puts the US in a similar situation during its Pax Americana, as Britain during the Pax Britannica: being the premier source of transforming technology while trying to foster international stability.

But the US is also a status quo Power, in that the current arrangement of world affairs suits its interests–as the major economic, financial, trading and military Power. It tends to act as the central manager of the international system–its performance as such is very much affected by its own interests, because that’s what Powers do. But precisely because the US has a bigger stake in international stability than any other polity else, it tends to be more active in trying to maintain that stability.

But being a status quo Power is not very compatible with being a revolutionary Power. And even more so, vice versa. It would be hard to argue that its attempts to export its Revolution to Mesopotamia and the Hindu Kush have been exactly stabilising, even as it sought to create a (new) stability.

A hardy perennial in (failed) US policies has been ignorance of history. Both the US as status quo Power and US as revolutionary Power tend to encourage history-fails. A status quo Power has a tendency to live in an eternal now. A revolutionary Power has a tendency to fixate on its own framing of social patterns and desirable outcomes. Add to that American exceptionalism, and you have a recipe for serial history-fails.

As has been particularly obvious in US interventions in the Middle East.

As Somaliland shows (the successful, formerly British, bit of the former Somalia), a House of Elders (in other words, a House of Lords) would very likely have been sensible policy in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as it would have connected government into traditional social structures. But hereditary and religious legislators, can’t have that! Because we’re Americans and we don’t think like that! Our Revolution is explicitly about no hereditary government, and separation of church and state, so a House of Elders (or Shura Council, or whatever) becomes unthinkable and unthought.

And holding a vote on whether to restore the king in Afghanistan (pdf) would also have been sensible policy. But we’re Americans and we don’t think like that!

Yes, but those folk you’re trying to help: they’re not Americans and they don’t think like you. Alas, American exceptionalism and the US-as-revolutionary-Power trumps trying to understand the local societies in their own terms and building something that might work for them.

Similarly, Iraq should have been divided into three, as any “Iraqi” identity was too shallow to survive any serious stress. But the US is a too much of a status quo power (and a little too ignorant of Middle Eastern history) to think like that either.

Being at the same time a status quo and a revolutionary power is a difficult double. Alas, it is also very well set up to create serial policy failure.

In Austrian school economics, and economics influenced by the same, there is often talk of entrepreneurs as making plans. This turns up, for example, in Mark Casson’s entrepreneurial theory of the firm (pdf).

As someone who is actually in business, I find the notion of plan somewhat problematic. The business I am a principal of does not make plans in any strong sense, it adopts strategies. It is not about a planned-out sequence of steps, but making decisions about purchases, procedures and communication. Yes, they are aimed at achieving certain outcomes, but in a flexible and operational way.

I suspect the plan usage is something of a holdover from when manufacturing was the dominant mode of private production. Making things does involve a certain amount of planning (and the bigger the thing being made, the more than is true). But, even manufacturing, firms are engaged in commerce, so are about (if they are to be successful) connecting to customers, and you do not control your customers or your competitors. So, the planning of manufacturing is still embedded within commercial strategies.

This is more than a semantic point. Operational strategies are more flexible things than plans. Strategies typically do not regiment decision-making, they coordinate it. The trick is not to target a precise outcome, but to have an outcome within the ambit of success for your commercial strategy. Which procedures such as, for example, just-in-time logistics make easier to achieve.

At a macro level, this makes coordination between commercial strategies somewhat easier. It also makes the entrepreneurial function less like something bureaucratic and more what it is–something very hard to replicate in a highly bureaucratised environment.

Which is my other objection to the plan usage. It does not make clear enough that what goes on in commerce and what goes on in the apparatus of the state tend to be significantly different.

Appeasement–in the form of conciliatory concessions–can be a perfectly reasonable way of dealing with folk. It entirely depends on how limited their aims are.

Mixed pastSo, the Middle Realm‘s Sons of Heaven used appeasement successfully for centuries in dealing with the steppe nomads to their north, the only open border of a unified China (with the partial exception of the Tibetan Empire) until the Europeans started projecting state power across China’s coasts in the C19th. The steppe rulers wanted resources to support their social position, particularly to pay their beholden warriors. The Sons of Heaven regularly obliged with extensive “gifts”, thereby purchasing border peace much more cheaply than did serious military campaigning. If anything, there was some under utilising of appeasement: the Southern Song did rather mishandle the expanding Mongol Empire, for example.

The Son of Heaven has been generous again, no raiding his lands this year.

The reason appeasement has such a tainted reputation is because of the failure of the policy of appeasing Hitler. The problem was that Hitler’s aims were much grander than the Anglo-French Alliance were prepared to concede. Unifying Germans into a single Reich was a limited aim. Achieving a lebensraum empire in Eastern Europe, not so much. Since that really was the aim of Hitler’s policy, indeed, his entire economic and military management of Germany, no policy of appeasement would have avoided conflict between Germany and the Democratic Powers unless the Anglo-French alliance was prepared to hand over all of Eastern Europe to Germany. Which they were not, with British public opinion in particular shifting strongly against further appeasement after Hitler’s occupying of “Bohemia and Moravia” clearly demonstrated that his aims extended well beyond just unifying Germans into the Reich.

Good or bad?The Western democracies are currently running a policy of appeasement on the cultural front. It is perfectly fine to satirise, lampoon and critique Christian and Jewish religious beliefs and sentiments as much as one wants. Doing the same to Islamic religious beliefs and sentiments, not so much.

Nor is there any mystery why. There are some Muslims perfectly prepared to assault and kill in the name of enforcing “respect” for Islamic beliefs and sentiments. The process may be selective, but the reality is clear.

So, is this good appeasement (conciliation that avoids conflict by giving folk enough of what they want) or bad appeasement (concessions that only encourage further demands)? Well, it depends on what the aims of the jihadis are, since they are the “pointy end” of the violence, the conflict attempting to be avoided.

Working out the aims is not hard for the jihadis are, like Hitler, clear about their ultimate aims. Just as reading Mein Kampf excellent insight into the aims of Nazi policy, so do the statements of the jihadis. For example, to them the Reconquista, the loss of al-Andalus, is a grievance that should be redressed. The existence of Israel is obviously a grievance. To Osama bin Laden, Australia supporting the independence of (Catholic) East Timor from (overwhelmingly Muslim) Indonesia was a grievance. The notion of democracy not subordinated to Shariais a grievance. And that we do not accept Sharia as our law is a grievance. (Their conception of Sharia, obviously.)

So, the short answer is no; the aims of the jihadis are not sufficiently limited that appeasement is going to work.

So, what about the current cultural appeasement, treating Muslim religious sensibilities with greater sensitivity than Jewish or Christian ones? Simply by killing a relatively small number of people, and implicitly and explicitly threatening to kill a few more, a fundamental principle of Sharia is seeping throughout the Western world–that Islam is entitled to superior treatment in the public arena than other religions. I would call that a win for both the jihadis aims and their chosen operational methods. Indeed, from their perspective, an inspiring win, given that lots of Muslims support giving Islam special status.

So, does the current cultural appeasement fulfil the jihadis full aims? No. Does it represent progress towards their aims? Yes. Is such appeasement going to work? Only in the sense of appeasement of Hitler “worked”–it will inspire them to keep doing what they are doing. So, the cultural appeasement will have the opposite effect regarding conflict–it will not lead to less, but to more. For the aims of the jihadis are too grandiose for appeasement to work. (And note that nothing in the above is an argument against Muslims having equal protection of the law and being accepted as citizens.)

So, a black guy with a long criminal record, a history of mental illness and attempted suicide, attempts to murder his girlfriend, kills two cops in Brooklyn and then shoots himself. A mainstream newspaper provides details on his life, ignoring an obvious one; he was Muslim (his name being Ismaayil Abdullah Brinkley is something of a hint).

There are some fairly obvious similarities with the Martin Place hostage taker. Violent misogyny: check. Homicidal self-righteousness: check. Terroristic grandstanding: check. Since police killing unarmed blacks (or civilians generally) is not a currently prominent issue in Australian society, that does not seem to be the link between the two homicidal grandstanders, despite the enormous rhetorical fuss made over that aspect of the Brooklyn killings in the US. Some of which commentary is stunningly innumerate and almost all of which is a case of just don’t go there. (And a black man walks up and kills two cops: that will of course do nothing to reinforce police fears of black men–this is John Wilkes Booth level of homicidal stupidity.)

Juan Cole insists that the media should not parade lone-wolf nuts as “Muslim terrorists”. (He is apparently getting his wish in the Brooklyn case, where it is being fitted into the preferred narrative of reaction to homicidal racist cops.) I think a much more interesting question is; why are there such similarities between two “lone wolf nuts” who happen to be Muslim from opposite sides of the globe?

Not all “lone wolf” terrorists are Muslim, but a disproportionate number are, with the disproportion increasing in recent years. Radical Islam seems to becoming the strongly preferred framing for grandstanding de-personalised homicide.

Something of a pattern

In the case of the Martin Place grandstander, it was not a case of no warning signs. The hostage-taker was someone whose dangerous qualities were presciently identified in a 2009 piece by an ABC religious affairs reporter. More recently, a SMH reporter was a little less prescient: she was, however, following Juan Cole’s preferred approach.

The Martin Place tragedy has now brought down the NSW Opposition Leader. But the late unlamented Man Monis is a perfect icon for culture war dispute–an asylum seeker, on welfare and out on bail as an accessory to murder. So, someone the Australian state let in, paid for and then let out. With all the rhetorical power, and statistical pointlessness, a single recognisable case provides.

The question of commonalities is even more interesting because of a somewhat similar case that occurred in Broken Hill a century ago and because such behaviour is being engaged in on an organised basis. With extras: is not part of the appeal of the Islamic State homicidal psychopathic sex tourism? With self-righteous religious rhetoric to match. An appeal than cannot be said to be entirely random; there are now apparently more British Muslims fighting for the Islamic State than in the British Army. Probably also true in Australia, although Australian jihadis are apparently being killed about the same rate as new recruits. The Syrian civil war has attracted thousands of foreign fighters, many of whom have ended up fighting for the Islamic State.

The jihadi movement considers democracy blasphemous or heretical–since it presumes for mere humans to take on the law-making prerogatives of God–engages in violent misogyny, Jew-hatred and queer-hatred while using modern technology (such as social media) to promote a violently atavistic warrior ethos which extols the triumph of the master-believers over all others. To the point of massacre, slavery and teaching children courses in beheading, with practice on (temporarily) live victims.

Atavistic counter-reaction

It is the contemporary version of Nazism: like it a violent atavistic counter-reaction against the stresses of modernity. As if to emphasise the point, there is a nasty cat’s cradle of links between Nazism and both Arab nationalism and radical Islam. Hitler, unsurprisingly, thought Islam a better religion than Christianity:

Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers–already, you see, the world have fallen into the hands of Jews, so gutless a thing is Christianity!–then we should have in all probability have been converted to Mohammadism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so (p.667).

Taunting a captured Iraqi officer.

The jihadis are even more explicit in their violence and brutality than the Nazis. It is not wildly unreasonable to suggest different religious framings might be a factor here: the teachings and actions of the Gospel Christ really are profoundly different from those of the Received Muhammad (who had folk who said bad things about him beheaded, massacred defeated males and sold their women and children into slavery–all of which may sound vaguely familiar).

On the face of it, the jihadi movement is a violent denial of everything Western progressives are supposed to stand for. And their collective inability to confront it in any useful way extends at times to active protection of, or even implicit collaboration with, its adherents and advocates. Going with the principle that any sin indicts Western civilisation or Western capitalism or Western whatever and no sin indicts Islam.

It is, as Nick Cohen puts it, the great betrayal. And yes, the generic indictments are bunk, but it is the selective willingness to engage in, or tolerate, them that is revealing. When lone wolf killers are white supremacists or extreme nationalists, going for general indictments is all the rage among progressives. If a lone wolf killer is a Muslim, that fact gets downplayed or simply ignored and general indictments are furiously denounced.

It is striking how intellectually impoverished modern progressivism has become: when real Nazism was stalking the world, progressivists did not attempt to frame the debate as “let’s not be nasty to Germans”. Nowadays, in the face of the homicidal reality of the jihadi movement (the overwhelming majority of whose victims are, in fact, Muslims), it appears that the only framing that is seriously adopted is “let’s not be nasty to Muslims”.

Apparently, anything resembling Nazi evil can only be committed by folk with white skins. A moral infantilising of the non-white on a massive scale. Not anti-racism at all; just massive purblind condescension passing itself of as compassion and anti-oppression while averting eyes from inconvenient victims (which, in the case of the Middle East, seems to be any minority except the one which is a majority elsewhere–the Palestinian sub-group of Arab Sunnis). Parading as modern moral bwanas ”protecting” their mascots of the moment.

A betrayal with consequences. Do folk really think that the attack on Sony over the film The Interview has nothing to do with the Mohammad Cartoons affair or the Satanic Verses fatwa? Demonstrable ability to be intimidated–or, worse, side with the intimidators–just encourages others to play the game (or pretend to, it is a bit murky what precise game was being played). Which, yet again, has been shown to work, at least to some extent.

And yes, the neocons and fellow travellers have demonstrated amazing capacity to be blundering fools or worse. But if they are the only “willing to do something” game in town, they will end up being the people turned to when the next mass attack happens. Nick Cohen makes a similar point about the British state’s predictably ham-fisted response to the domestic manifestations of radical Islam. (A somewhat similar point was also made by Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson {pdf} about the Northern Territory Intervention and progressivist aversion from issues of simple functionality in indigenous communities.) When public speech primarily becomes a game of “I am more virtuous than you” dealing with issues that profoundly affect people’s lives gets lost in the game-playing.

OK, let’s not be nasty to Muslims generically. But let’s actually have an open debate about strains within Islam (both as a religion and as a civilisation), let’s not engage in the massive condescension of refusing to critically examine ideas held by non-white folk, let’s critically consider using religion to project viciously nasty ideas (other than, and much worse than, conservative Christians) and accept that evil is not limited to folk with white skins. Especially as, in the world today, Christians are disproportionately the victims of inter-religious violence.

Let’s also not hide inside a Condescension Virtue Bubble, congratulating oneself on moral courage and perception and the wickedness of dissent; an impoverished perspective that does not seem to have anything to say about homicide, massacre, slavery and vicious misogyny beyond “let’s not be nasty to Muslims”.

Really folks, how would “let’s not be nasty to Germans” seem at the time, or in retrospect, as a preferred response to Nazism?